Cape Cod Beaches Closed After Great White Shark Rips A Seal Apart A Few Feet From Shore

ORLEANS, Mass. – A shark seen feasting on a seal just feet off a Cape Cod beach Monday sent swimmers and surfers scrambling to shore.

Thayer Wade captured video of the gruesome sight on Nauset Beach in Orleans, the shark mercilessly tearing at the seal as the water turned red.

Wade, of Needham, had been sitting on the beach reading, but his uncle, Pat O’Brien, of Waltham, had been swimming when they heard thrashing and screaming.

“They were like, ‘Shark! Shark! Get out of the water! Shark!’” O’Brien told Boston 25 News Monday. “I looked back and I could see all this blood coming out of the seal, just shooting out of him.”

After O’Brien got out of the ocean, he noticed two teenage surfers struggling to return to the shore.

“We were yelling at them, ‘Swim! Swim! Get out of the water! Get out of the water! Shark! Shark!’” O’Brien said, explaining that he and another man approached one of the boys and grabbed him by the arm. “He’s like, ‘Help me! Help me!’ So we pulled him out. We got him out okay, and then the seal just kept going down, and the blood was just everywhere.”

With assistance, the second surfer also made it to shore.

“The guy who I pulled out, he thought his friend was dead, because he just looked down and he saw the blood and he heard the screaming,” O’Brien said. “The seal made this awful sound. The seal was like screaming.”

It’s real out here on these Cape Cod beaches.  Seals getting ripped limb from limb just a few feet away from shore and inches away from surfers.

Paddleboarders getting their boards chomped on.

Donnie and I were just on these beaches two weeks ago.  This could have been us:

Scary shit.  And still with a few weeks of summer left and an economy driven by tourism.  Feel like we need to send someone out there to catch this thing, clean these beaches up, keep people safe and keep the people off welfare for the winter.  Just him, no mates, too many captains on that island.  10 thousand bucks and he’ll get you everything – the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.